Best Visual Artist

One test of good work is whether it's relevant at the time of its creation. Double that when art feels fresh several decades later. Laguna Beach artist G. Ray Kerciu's Confederate-flag paintings were a strike against bigotry in the 1960s, painted while he was living in Mississippi, the bastion of Southern racism. Two of the paintings recently hung in the Laguna Art Museum, and they continue to speak to us—about Ferguson, South Carolina, abuse of power, #BlackLivesMatter—just as loudly as they did half a century before.